NM's blog

The Forsyte family is the lens through which we observe the state of the nation," playwright and screenwriter Lin Coghlan tells the BBC. "It was a moment in history where imperialism and profit built families and institutions – but at an extraordinary cost. A theme which never becomes irrelevant.” “Pivotal to the entire story is an episode in which he rapes his wife – although marital rape was not illegal when Galsworthy was writing: it was not outlawed in the UK until 1991. “Another of the books' themes is imperialism – dominion over other nations, as well as the dominion of one generation over another, and of one person over another. The family is the empire in miniature .”

Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. — Theodore Roosevelt , 1904

From the Frankfurt School and radical social criticism to silence on war crimes. How Germany’s remembrance culture ignores [is complicit in] war crimes German publisher tells Palestinian staff to quit The hypocrisy of Jürgen Habermas At issue is not an accidental, negligible or ‘unfortunate’ streak of racism  in the works of a stellar European philosopher.